Viewpoint-wise
- 1 June 2007
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of English Linguistics
- Vol. 35 (2), 132-156
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424207300619
Abstract
In the second half of the twentieth century, a new type of adverb, viewpoint adverbs formed with the suffix -wise, appeared in English. This article traces the diffusion and development of viewpoint -wise adverbs using American and British newspaper corpora, the spoken component of the British National Corpus, and the Longman Spoken American Corpus. It is shown that the adverbs are at least twice as frequent in the spoken corpora as in the written, that they are increasing in both American and British English, and that the originally American adverb type is now more frequent in British English. Its spread seems to be motivated by both functional and social factors. In newspapers, a high proportion occurs in represented speech, and the major domains are sports, art and entertainment, and “living.” It has extended its range of bases from nouns to noun phrases and, to some extent, generalized to adjectives and adverbs.This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit:
- RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN VIEWPOINT-WISEAmerican Speech, 2005
- Word-Formation in EnglishPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2003
- The Cambridge Grammar of the English LanguagePublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2002
- Is it, stylewise or otherwise, wise to use -wise?Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company ,2002
- Morphological productivity across speech and writingEnglish Language and Linguistics, 1999
- Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress: Loss of the Verbal Coda in Topic-Restricting as Far as ConstructionsLanguage, 1995
- Variation across Speech and WritingPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1988
- English Word-FormationPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1983
- The Suffix -WiseAmerican Speech, 1968
- A Socio-linguistic View of Innovation:-lyand-wiseWORD, 1968